“She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.”

This seems to harken back to Ryan’s infamous claim that the safety net is a “hammock” that lulls people into “dependency and complacency.” In this tale, the boy’s mother seems to be the person swaying back and forth in the hammock. The larger idea here has already been addressed by Jonathan Chait and Paul Krugman. Both point out that if anything, the anecdote underscores the need for free lunches; after all, if the boy’s mother isn’t giving him a brown-paper-bag lunch, whatever the reason for that, a school lunch is the next best immediate option.

Now Kessler finds that the anecdote is fiction — the creation of a misstatement by the official who originally offered it.

Two additional points here. While the original purveyor did botch the tale, the failure to vet it before presenting it to a national audience seems like more of the “lazy mendacity” Jonathan Bernstein talks about. Lawmakers get so used to saying whatever they want unchallenged inside the Conservative Media Entertainment Complex that claims go increasingly un-vetted.

More important, the idea behind the story is central to Paul Ryan’s larger bamboozlement. Ryan is set to offer up a budget. As of now, his stated goals — balancing the budget in 10 years; not cutting defense to #Obummer levels; preserving the Medicare benefits Republicans want to attack Dems for cutting — would seem to leave no option other than deep cuts to programs for the poor, as in previous budgets. At the same time, Ryan has embarked on a campaign to prove the GOP cares deeply about poverty. The only way to make all of this work is to argue that slashing programs for the poor is the way to help them — hence anecdotes like the one above that are designed to give that notion a philosophical gloss.

Ryan’s anecdotal effort to do that may have earned him a sound fact-check thrashing. But he is still basically functioning in a media environment where he is greeted great deference as a serious wonk, even as the truly draconian nature of his fiscal vision and its fundamentally absurd pretentions to caring about poverty — not to mention its violence to mathematical reality — escape serious press scrutiny.

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 175,000 in February, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 6.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in professional and business services and in wholesale trade but declined in information.

Revisions of the December and January jobs numbers were negligible; a total of 25,000 more jobs was added for the two months. Time for those infrastructure repair programs to create jobs that Republicans used to support before Obama was president!

The Non-Farm Payrolls report was solid. This suggests that the economy was a bit stronger than we thought. there was a big gain in average hourly earnings (+0.4%), the strongest in a long time. This is a sign of a tightening labor force, which is something markets have been talking about lately, that the market is tighter than people realize.

Bottom line: A solid, goldilocks report that the market will like. But the average hourly earnings is a big story.

Washington Republicans have described Jolly’s campaign…as a Keystone Cops operation, marked by inept fundraising, top advisers stationed hundreds of miles away from the district in the state capital and the poor optics of a just-divorced, 41-year-old candidate accompanied on the campaign trail by a girlfriend 14 years his junior…It is rare for party officials to criticize one of their own candidates, even anonymously, days before an election. One explanation may be so they can point to Jolly — as opposed to the national political mood or the ineffectiveness of attacks against Sink over her support for Obamacare — if he loses.

Such an outcome will be widely interpreted in national terms by the press, but if Jolly does lose, truthfully it won’t tell us much about how Obamacare will impact particular red state Dem Senators’ reelection campaigns.

Remember, Tillis is struggling to articulate his position on Obamacare: He knows he can’t be for full repeal and nothing else, but he also can’t embrace any specific alternatives — so he’s endorsing Obamacare’s general goals, which alone is getting him hit from the right by Brannon. It’s another way in which the politics of Obamacare are more complicated for Republicans than they allow.

That posture stands in contrast with other members of his party, notably Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who argues that the United States should be wary of foreign intervention and retreat from the policies of the George W. Bush era. The divergent national security views of the two ambitious, first-term senators offer an early preview of a debate sure to play out in the Republican presidential primary in 2016.

Can Rubio make sufficient amends for his heretical exercise in bipartisan problem solving by vowing to restore the foreign policy luster of the Bush years? We’ll soon find out.

* MITCH McCONNELL PUNCHES BACK AT CONSERVATIVES: ABC News reports that Mitch McConnell’s campaign is up with a new ad hitting back at Tea Party challenger Matt Bevin. The ad, interestingly, also hits his leading outside-group antagonist, the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has funded ads against him. The spot decries “out of state” interests, which is interesting given McConnell’s defense of the Koch brothers.

Beyond that, this is a reminder that McConnell, while likely to win his primary, could enter into the general election after a bruising fight with the right, which Dems hope will depress the conservative enthusiasm he needs to win.

The reason so many Americans remain trapped in poverty isn’t that the government helps them too much; it’s that it helps them too little…It is, in a way, nice to see the likes of Mr. Ryan at least talking about the need to help the poor. But somehow their notion of aiding the poor involves slashing benefits while cutting taxes on the rich. Funny how that works.

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